I have been whistling for about three years, playing chiefly ITM. Lately, I have been playing much more English Traditional Music (ETM?), after all, I am English. I can find very little (in fact none at all), material relating to English tunes. However, I read somewhere that the English style benefits from much greater tonguing than one would usually incorporate in Irish tunes.
Is this correct ?
Any observations or comments ?
Many thanks from East Tisted, a cold and wet village in Hampshire !
Hi Clive,
I’ll tell my husband about your question - he is Martin Milner on this message board and plays almost exclusively English music, though he plays fiddle and melodeon more than whistle these days.
I’ve been playing a lot from the complete Playford book, and have gotten a little instruction. The style depends almost not at all on the ornamentation of ITM, so, yes, tonguing is much more prevalent. But don’t go tonguing every note or anything, there’s still a lot of slurring. Most importantly, though, is the phrasing and flow of the music.
The Baltimore Consort put out an album of Playford tunes and songs, which has (probably) historically accurate settings of the pieces.
Hi Clive,
I play some english tunes too and a lot of swedish folk music. And my impression is that there is more tonguing in english and swedish folk music when played on a wind instrument. But tonguing varies a lot among ITM players a lot. Some tonguing a lot and other hardly never. My own theory is that it is the closeness to the bagpipe tradition that has influenced tin whistle playing in Ireland and the highlands.
Hi, Clive,
I used to live in Hampshire, in Fleet! Knew E. Tisted. Small world. Here in Devon is wet and windy too, today!
I play almost all English music, with some Scottish, American and a smattering of ITM to keep my hand in. I play folk songs and folk dance music, Playford and other styles, plus hymn tunes and anything else I like the sound of! I adjust my style, and the amount of tonguing, to the music and / or the needs of the dance. Some need more emphasis than others, for example. I love our music.
I’ve read Smash The Windows (single jig or slide) was possibly of English origin? How true that is of course remains a mystery for myself, I just like the tune.
Yes, that’s my casual impression, too. Or more accurately, that English dance music tends to favor a more pointed, “stotty” aesthetic than the flow usually associated with ITM. And that’s across the board, with melodeon and fiddle styles leading the way and whistle style following. Players like Robin Williamson and Vin Garbutt seem to exhibit this. And many English dance tunes seem akin to Irish hornpipes, barndances and polkas, which also encourage a more pointed approach. It’s not just the tonguing, but the whole feel and rhythm of the tunes. Maybe there’s some influence from English tabor piping style, too.
A related example might be the whistle style of Aberdeen and the Scottish Northeast, with Alex Green as a practitioner. His whistle playing is certainly more pointed and tongued than anything you’d expect in ITM.
Jeremy Barlow, editor of the Faber edition of the collected Playford tunes and leader of early music group the broadside band, claims that recorders rather than transverse flutes are the ‘authentic’ period wind instruments for this repertoire.
If that’s the case, then it’s not difficult to guess that a great deal of tonguing was going on.
Very helpful, thanks to all for your responses
Clive
I certainly find that English music comes more easily to me. It may be because it is slower, or a bit less sophisticated. Mainly I think it’s because I am English!
I have found Dave Mallison’s “English Pub Session Tunes” a useful collection, although it contains quite a lot of Irish tunes as well. Most of the stuff they play here in Devon is in there.
My whistle teacher used to tell me to stop tonguing everything or I would make ITM sound like morris tunes. He meant it as a warning, but perhaps if you want to play morris tunes it is good advice!
Hi Clive,
regarding tunes, I highly recommend Dave Townsend’s English Dance Music Volumes 1 & 2. That’ll give you 260 tunes to be going on with.
There’s also the Nick Barber books Lovely Nancy and Bonny Kate, now combined under the title Nick Barber’s English Choice. There are 2 cds available to hear the tunes played. There will be some overlap between this and the previous set, but the Nick Barber book contains a greater selection of modern tunes.
The Dave Mallinson series mentioned by Okewhistle also includes English Pub Session Tunes and Popular English Session Tunes. I’ve got all three, but have used the Dave Townsend books more.
All these are available on Hobgoblin Music’s website http://www.hobgoblin.com/local/contfram.htm
Do search around on the net as you may find them a pound or two cheaper elsewhere.
There is a specific Hampshire Dance tunes book, which I haven’t got but might be fun for you.
There are also various Morris Dance tunebooks espcially for tunes currently used in Morris dancing, but if you’re not playing for Morris these are probably unnecessary. Many tunes will appear in more than one book, and in more than one version.
Regarding style, ETM isn’t driven by the need for speed that is wrecking much of ITM (for me), maybe because it’s mostly played by people who also dance and play for dancing. I’ve played for both English Country Dances and Morris Dancing, and a comfortable dance tempo with a solid beat is much more important than all the twiddly bits that Irish music seems to require.
Martin,
Thanks for your comments. I have just started on the Nick Barber book and Cd’s and am finding them very helpful. I shall move on to the others as I progress.
As an aside, I am fairly new to sessions, and am finding I tend to get lost when drowned out by the greater volume of other instruments. I am hoping this will change with time
Clive
Do you consider the Clare style ITM as a style not within the much of ITM which is in the “wrecking”?
Much of the music Martin dismisses is actually played for dancers by people who are well able to dance a set. The difference is they don’t go around waving hankies at eachother while doing it.
Also note when playing for dancers, the dancers are usually the ones pushing for more speed.
Are you talking about dancers in County Clare? Might that then turn towards my earlier question?
And do you have a problem with hankies? Perhaps you feel a little threatened by them?
Not as much as by the guys wielding the sticks. Or the ones dressed up as horses.
Being English myself and having had a fair amount of exposure to ETM in various guises, I think these kinds of generalisation and nose thumbing are pretty silly! Yes, ETM, dance music especially and Morris accompaniment in particular can be very lumpen. But it doesn’t have to be and the good stuff isn’t. The English song tradition very significantly overlaps with Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Breton, French and so forth, with many ballads existing in cognate versions in multiple languages and with related melodies, although regional singing styles may vary just like accents. Most have their own beauty. English dance music also varies regionally, as do the styles of playing it - Northumbria being the most obviously distinct. Since the 1970s, particularly influenced by Blowzabella, there has been a significant (but not uniform or overwhelming) style trend in interpretation of English instrumental music that reflects both Early Music (David Munrow etc.) and French trad ways of approaching tunes, (availability of good continental accordions/melodeons and the revival of bagpipes and hurdy gurdies in playing this music was important) and that has produced many lovely, highly listenable, flowing but rhythmically strong performances and recordings. Think Andy Cutting, for example. That trend I believe played a large part in reviving ETM when the lumpen aspect was a bad joke and many English players (like myself, yes!) were turning to the apparently greater, or at least better represented, more accessible and more facile (to the listener) pleasures of Celtic music - it may well not reflect a true continuous tradition, but it sure made something worthwhile of the material which has now become in itself a new living tradition growing out of those roots. That said, I’ve met old-timers in backwoods Gloucestershire pumping out lumpy old morris tunes on 1-row 4-stop melodeons absolutely wonderfully - the ETM equivalent of ITM “Old Geezers”. Of course it is different from mainstream ITM, but so what? I wouldn’t say either was better than the other, nor that anyone has to like both, but again, so what? There are many very fine younger ETM musicians playing to extremely high standards. I’d concede that the average general standard of musical accomplishment among Irish and probably Scottish players, young or old, who are actively interested in their native traditions (and the majority are not, sadly) is probably higher than among their English (or Welsh) counterparts (a more useful generalisation), as indeed is the level of interest in the populations at large. The fact that ETM and WTM are more revivalist than strong continuous traditions when compared to ITM and STM both reflects the histories and social trends of the different nations and is reflected in the current participation and the standards thereof. Many of the ITM “Old Geezers” that some folk here rave about are, to my ears, unlistenably poor performers, though they have some use as archival sources of tunes and regional style. Many otherwise competent ETM players fail to understand ITM and think it is all incredibly fast, so if they try to play it at all, they play it thus, and murder it. ETM is maybe less “twiddly”, but ranges of tempi are probably pretty similar to ITM, and a surprisingly high proportion of the repertory, just like the songs, crops up in both ITM and ETM (and/or STM or WTM) maybe under different names and in variant versions, to an extent that determining national or regional “origin” is often not possible. There is so much in common, and surely we all would prefer to see ongoing popular participation in all the nations in their own traditions than otherwise? So why knock lumps off each other? Recognise and value both the links and commonalities as well as the variances and differences! This is ALL N.W. European music growing out of common, general N.W. European Renaissance roots in terms of dance forms, meters, modes and melodies.
I’ll breath again now! The above is a bit of a scattergun outpouring of related thoughts rather than a well organised thesis, but…
I think Martin may have been referring to the sort of ITM we encounter at sessions in London (note: not Northern London, where many of the Irish communities are located) - the majority of the “Irish sessions” we have been to in west and central London seem to be more about going as fast as possible than about playing tunes with lift and style. I am sure that it is not like this everywhere (it certainly wasn’t when I visited Ireland).
Thanks for answering my sincere question. I hope your answer may incidentally serve to mollify Peter Laban.
So what are sessions like in Northern London?
I haven’t been to any…the problem is they start really late and it takes about two hours to get back home from North London - you have to travel south into the centre and then back to the west, no direct link. So if a session doesn’t even start till 10 PM and I have to be at work in the morning it’s not really feasible - plus the last tube train home on the Central line (the one that takes us west) stops running shortly after midnight.